


there are armies rising out of me

by perennials



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, KRTSK Angst Week 2018, M/M, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 14:24:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16306898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: This is the history they will leave behind.





	there are armies rising out of me

**Author's Note:**

> cw: mild injuries and blood, mentioned violence. implied minor character death
> 
> krtsk week prompt: injury

The first time Kei sees Kuroo in three months, it is a cold winter night. The sparsely-lit living room is heavy with sleep, Kei busy arranging bottles on one of the tall shelves when a heavy thud sounds from outside. Heart in throat, he skids towards the front door.

 

Kuroo is leaning heavily against the sandstone wall, his armor glinting dully beneath the deep burgundy of his army cloak. His hair is mussed; his eyes are rimmed with red. Every time he breathes it is like glass cracking, wisps of condensation curling up into the black of the night. He lifts his head weakly.

 

“Hey,” he says. Kei barely has time to blink.

 

Kuroo crumples to the ground.

  
  


//

  
  


There are no winners or losers in the war. Kei knows this better than anyone else; his parents left with their rucksacks full of potions and herbs and salves one day, and never came back. Barely nine-and-a-half, Kei had watched with moon-round eyes as an army officer with a face like a rock set his mother’s pocket knife on their living room table.  _ We are very sorry for your loss.  _ But Kei hadn’t understood— they didn’t  _ sound  _ sorry. The man didn’t sound sorry. He sounded empty.

 

There are no winners or losers in the war. There are only those who fight, and those who stay behind. The ones who stay hold their breaths like good luck charms in the quiet sanctity of night, whispering prayers over and over again. The ones who fight, fight.

 

Kuroo  _ fights.  _ Kuroo is good at it, knows his way around a sword and shield the way Kei knows how to make a thousand potions that can bleed a man to death. Kuroo has been good at it for as long as Kei can remember.

 

He has always been reckless, too. When he turns up on Kei’s doorstep, he is bloody and beaten and black-red-blue all over, already halfway to hell. The word Kei uses is hell, because Kuroo doesn’t believe soldiers go to heaven. The word Kei uses is hell, because he thinks all of them are going to end up there eventually. They have taken childhoods and families and lives, so many lives— there is nothing left to salvage here.

 

Swallowing the wave of panic that threatens to crest in his chest, Kei lifts Kuroo up and half-drags, half-carries him into his workshop. His hands come away slick with blood. Laid out on the white marble table, Kuroo hisses through his teeth, fingers clenching and unclenching instinctively. The candles in the room sway with fear.

 

Kei clenches his jaw, peels away the first layer of wet fabric.

 

Kuroo’s lucky Kei’s good at what he does. He’s fucking lucky.

  
  


//

  
  


Kuroo’s out of it for a week. In that week, Kei goes out to buy supplies thrice, Yamaguchi visits with freshly-baked bread from Yachi’s and extra salves, and Kenma sticks his head in, looking pale as winter, just once. He gets a few more patients, and Kuroo has to be moved into the bedroom. On Wednesday, Sawamura from the cavalry arrives, bringing information that Kei’s been both dreading and anticipating.

 

“...He walked from the northern front,  _ all the way  _ back here.” Kei doesn’t even have the strength left in him to be horrified. He’s been tending to Kuroo’s grueling fever all night, hasn’t slept a wink in two days. His head feels like it’s been pulled through a meat grinder.

 

Sawamura gives him a pained, sympathetic look. By now, they all know what it feels like to watch someone you care for pull themselves apart. It is never pleasant. “I’m sorry. We should have kept a closer eye on him.”

 

But at the end of the day, Kei can’t blame him. The fault was never his, or even Kuroo’s. They were all born on the wrong page of history, all of them. That’s all there is to it. He sends Sawamura off with a bit of bread and a spell for the ache in his left shoulder he mentioned earlier, and then goes back to his spellbooks for the afternoon.

 

Later on, Kei sits on the edge of the bed, and wonders. Kuroo’s fever has finally subsided, but his face is still pale as porcelain, his lips blood-crusted and cracked. His eyelashes flutter as he sleeps. The curtains are drawn, and light from the dying sun floods into the room like an ocean wave, painting the sharp lines of his face in honeyed gold.

 

He’s beautiful, even like this. He’s beautiful.

 

Kei’s shadow falls over the bed as he moves, presses the flat of his palm against Kuroo’s cheek. The skin there is cold. There is a cut under his eye, small but deceptively deep. There are cuts all over his body. Kei had surveyed the damage that night in a capital state of panic, his pulse hammering wildly even as he uncovered every knife-wound, every bruise, every broken bone. Kuroo hadn’t been cursed, at the very least. Thank the gods he hadn’t been cursed.

 

Still unconscious, Kuroo turns his face slightly, nuzzling into the warmth of Kei’s hand. Kei feels his face contort; with his stupid messy hair and his long lashes, slack-jawed and relaxed, Kuroo doesn’t look ready to fight a war. He is barely nineteen, barely old enough to be learning how to wield a bow and an arrow, barely big enough to fit into the heavy leather boots the soldiers wear. There is something cruelly innocent about him, like this, when he is not trying to act brave or coy or smart for Kei’s sake. Something vulnerable.

 

But Kuroo is a fighter. And fighters fight, are good at what they do, trade luck for lives like they’ve got all the spare change in the world. It is a currency Kei has never liked, never wanted to deal in. It is a reality that strips the humanity right out of the earthquakes of their bodies.

 

Soon, he will open his eyes, and then Kei will be alone again.

  
  


//

  
  


“The army has a shortage of medics, doesn’t it.”

 

Kuroo goes still. He doesn’t turn around, but when he speaks, his voice is low, tight with restraint.

 

“Don’t go there, Tsukki. Don’t.”

 

Kei looks at the fine muscles in his back, the curve of his waist. There isn’t a single part of him that is unblemished or untouched. Kuroo’s skin is a map of scars. Kei doesn’t say anything in response, so he leaves, and then comes back a minute later with two glasses of water. He sets those on the bedside table.

 

“I’m tired,” Kei sighs into his skin, their legs tangled beneath the sheets. There’s a familiar ache in his chest, like a nursery rhyme from his childhood, something that’s been with him for a long, long time. It hurts, and he’s used to it, and it hurts. He presses his lips to the juncture between Kuroo’s neck and shoulder, feels his heart thrumming beneath his skin. For tonight, at least, he is safe. Even if only for tonight.

 

“You could say that again.” Kuroo chuckles softly, and Kei savors that sound, vows to commit the cadence of it to memory. Kuroo kisses the crown of Kei’s head.

 

Tomorrow Kuroo leaves for the northern front. There, the spells fly faster than arrows, and the knives cut deeper than bone. There, Kei’s heart will be a liability again, brittle and small.

 

Tonight, Kei pretends he’ll have him close by for as long as he wants, and lets sleep take him away.

  
  


//

  
  


“Hey, dumbass.”

 

Kuroo stares at him blankly. A heartbeat of time passes, and then recognition lights up his face.

 

“Kei,” he says, sounding absolutely wrecked. “Kei, I— oh my god.”

 

Kei sets his supplies on the floor beside him and folds his arms, cocking his head to one side. If he turns at just the right angle, the morning light hits his glasses and half of Kuroo disappears beneath a film of pure white. It’s easier to look at him, this way.

 

“I heard you walked all the way across the middlelands with a fucking hole in your side.”

 

Kuroo drops his gaze, looking guilty. He’s pushed himself up to a sitting position, not without wincing; he fiddles absently with the sheets pulled over his legs.

 

“...I wasn’t really thinking.”

 

“Clearly. Clearly, you were not.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

Kei’s hands are trembling slightly where they’re tucked close to his body. He scowls, frustrated with himself for being weak and emotional and unable to deal with the sharp acidity of reality. Always, always, he cannot deal. And because Kuroo is Kuroo, he senses the frailness to him. He smiles, still weak, still lopsided, and pats the empty space on the bed.

 

He smiles like the sun, and Kei reaches for him.

  
  


//

  
  


The next morning, he takes his mother’s pocket knife— the beautiful one, the family heirloom made of precious metal and engraved with rubies and shards of magic— out of the dresser, and gives it to Kuroo.

  
  


//

  
  


There are no winners or losers in the war. They all know this; their empire has been at war with the souls across the border for as long as Kei has been alive, and even longer. His parents are dead. So are Kuroo’s. The village they live in is half-populated with ghosts.

 

Still, Kei thinks, as Kuroo tangles his fingers in his hair, he wishes otherwise. They are all human, no matter how many knives and curse-scrolls they keep close to their chests. They are all entitled to a little bit of hope.

 

Kuroo kisses him something fierce. Kei wants him to live.

 

He tells him that, afterwards, drawing the blankets around his torso to keep the winter chill away. His eyelids are weighed down with rocks, his limbs pleasantly sore. There’s a mark on his neck that Kuroo put there, and he wants it to stay. He presses the pads of his fingers to it.

 

“I have dreams, sometimes, where you’re dead and Sawamura brings the news.” Kei tells him something like that. Not the exact same thing, because Kei doesn’t speak in straight lines when he does speak, and rarely speaks at all. If he opens his mouth, that means he’s terrified. If he lets you kiss him, he’s already sold you his entire soul.

 

This is the truth of their reality— this cruel, twisted thing with thorns and teeth and jagged, bloody nails. This is the history they will leave behind.

 

“I have dreams, too.” Kuroo tilts his face towards the moon, its glow limning him in pure silver. There’s a pause, a break in the steady lull of his breathing.

 

“In my dreams, there’s no war, and you don’t have to make things that kill people.”

 

Kei leans against his back, studies his hands in the tenebrosity of three a.m..

 

“That’s a nice dream.”

 

For a while, neither says anything. Outside the window, a crow caws from far, far away. The village is fast asleep around them. Then:

 

“I’ve been called back up to the western front.”

 

Kei bites back the sigh that builds up in the back of his throat. He takes the sadness and puts it all away. He has seen enough people leave to know when to let the shadows eat you up, and when to fight back; Kei may not be a fighter like Kuroo, but he will be a lighthouse. He will be a constant.

 

Kuroo looks over his shoulder at him, anyway. His hair is mussed and sticking up all over the place; his lips are curled into a small half-smile. Wearing nothing but moonlight, strong and sleek and soft in all the places Kei has touched him in, it’s like Kei is seeing him for the first time. Kei does not deserve him. No one does.

 

“You’d better come back, or I’ll raise hell for the army.”

 

Kuroo laughs, bone-brittle and bright. “It’s an honor to hear that from the esteemed Tsukishima Kei.”

 

“Shut up. Come back.

 

I’m not going anywhere. I hope you know that.”

 

“Neither am I,” Kuroo whispers, his gaze going soft. He turns to face Kei properly, slides his fingers under his chin, and brings their lips together. The kiss is chaste, sweet, warm like honeyed water and summer afternoons.

 

“Neither am I. I promise.”

  
  


//

  
  


Call it foolishness if you want, to love someone who will disappear eventually. The gods have decreed that Kei will always be the one left behind in the dust, picking up the broken pieces of the apocalypse. He knows this: he has lived through enough lonely, sleepless nights, whispering prayers into the stagnant air like good luck charms. He has read the history books.

 

Call it foolishness if you want, to love someone who will disappear eventually. Be cynical, be cruel. Be everything the world already is, and then some more, because it’s easier that way. It’s easier.

 

Call it whatever the hell you want. Kei calls it hope. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> i took two naps today, one in school and then one after school and i'm still tired so i guess i'm dying. i died so hard i was like what the fuck i have some time on my hands, i'm gonna stop destroying myself with buzzfeed unsolved and write some shit for angst week instead. so yeah. here is angst week prompt something, thing something. i'm trying to shift my lens back towards the world at large and write for myself! it's a work in progress. also i left the ending on a pretty high note but tbh i think if i kept expanding on this someone would die eventually (banging 1 pot and 1 pan together in the bg) yeah Someone probably  
> as always thank youuuuuu for reading my shit, you're cool. kudos and comments and bookmarks are all deeply appreciated, but whatever floats your boat floats your boat. i understand. happy boat floating
> 
> have a good one


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